In the darkness of the cold movie theatre outside Los Angeles, on a stretch of desert where the heat ripples in the distance, dozens of chatty teenagers are settling into their plush chairs, hands reaching for popcorn and soda.

 

The movie is about to start. But for this group of 300 fresh-faced kids there will be no movie trailers to watch or disembodied voices extolling the virtues of silence.

 

For that matter, there won’t be the familiar credit and title sequence to kick off the movie, either.

 

No, for these kids, all recruited by officious looking adults toting clipboards on the street, this is not a carefree evening at the local multiplex. Instead, it is a workday of sorts. Their pay? A free movie. Theirjob? To tell movie directors, producers and movie studio heads what’s good about their unreleased movie and what stinks about it.

 

As part of what’s called pre-release in-theatre testing, or test screening, these moviegoers and thousands of others across the United States are key decision-makers in determining what 90% of major studio releases ook like when they hit theatres.

 

Even more important, by expressing their likes and dislikes, these people will help set the tone of the marketing strategy used to promote the movie and determine how many millions of dollars will be used to do it.

 

Because this is an art and a commerce, people want to see whether their intentions are being delivered on the screen, says Karen Hermelin, Managing Director for MarketCast, a leading audience testing company.

 

Unless they have real people who aren’t themselves watching it, they can’t know.

 

While the movie is on, the creative team behind the movie, along with the studio’s marketing team and a handful of researchers, sit in the back of the theatre. They listen for responses from the group, including laughs when there should be laughs; gasps when there should be gasps; and, with luck, very little of the squirming so familiar to everyone who has sat through a bomb.

 

After the movie is over, the people who watched it will fill out a one-page questionnaire, answering questions such as, How would you describe the film when talking to your friends? Or, To whom would you recommend this movie? The questions are almost always the same, although a few are specific to the movie being tested.

 

Nearly two dozen people will then be pulled from the audience to get together for a focus group. There they’ll talk about the movie with researchers from market research companies. The researchers then compile the findings and present them the next day to the filmmakers and studio executives, some of whom don't want to know what the audience had to say.

 

The rule of thumb is if more than 80% of the test audience say something is good, well, then it’s good.

 

If not, the Hollywood post-production machine gets to work on reshaping the movie. Audience testing is used to determine many things, but whether or not the movie will become a blockbuster isn’t typically one of them.

 

More often, the test screenings are used to figure out who the audience for the movie will be and, more important, which parts of the film need to be tweaked, rethought, re-shot, or, in worst case scenarios, radically overhauled.

 

When changes are made, most often it is to the movie’s ending. A rough estimate is that half of all tested movies are re-shot and about half the changes are made to the ending. The reason for that, say directors, is that endings are usually the most difficult scene to get right. And the ending can be critical to a movie’s success, since it’s likely to leave an impression on moviegoers.

 

You can certainly diagnose what your problems are says David Madden, Executive Vice President at Twentieth Century Fox and producer of Against the Ropes, Runaway Bride and other movies.

 

But if you go into a focus group with 20 people and someone says, Oh, you should cut out that character, and then the studio says, Well, look, that person says you should cut out that character. That’s where it becomes a dangerous weapon. It’s nerve-wracking.

 

Nerve-wracking because these people pulled off the street will help decide if a creative team, often having spent years on a project, has done a good job or a lousy job. Beyond that they will help studios figure out how much financial support they will give a movie.

 

Based on those previews they map out a marketing campaign and assign a budget to it, says one audience research executive.

 

If you have a $100 million movie, you’re going to have a big marketing budget. If you have a $30 million movie, you’re going to have a small budget. But if you have a $100 million movie that tests poorly you may have a very small budget.

 

It’s no surprise that audience testing does have its detractors. Hollywood is filled with tales of directors storming out of test screenings and others, adamant that stiffs off the street shouldn’t mess with their vision, refuse to put their name on a post-test, edited version of their movie.

 

Kevin Reynolds from the 1991 Kevin Costner movie, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, for instance, was famously no where to be found when Warner Bros. called in movie doctor Stuart Baird to do a massive edit job on what ultimately became a hit movie.

 

Audience testing is a part of the Hollywood system few moviegoers know about. But it is also one that virtually every filmmaker and studio executive is quite familiar with.

Making the final cut

Despite rumours to the contrary, however, Hollywood’s credo is not, or at least isn’t always, Creativity be damned; we want money. Still, with millions of dollars on the line, creativity can take a backseat when it comes to ensuring a movie reaches its greatest box office potential. In short, investors want their money back.

 

To ensure they get it, many of the movies that achieve blockbuster status get whacked following an audience test.

 

Among the most well known movies to be reworked is E.T., the top-grossing movie of the 1980s. Before audience testing, the tearjerker was to have the extra-terrestrial dying instead of, as in post-test, flying off to his home planet.

 

In Pretty Woman, Richard Gere’s rich guy was to walk away from Julia Robert’s prostitute, rather than come back and get her.

 

And in Fatal Attraction, test audiences hissed when Glenn Close's nut job killed herself. The focus group folks must have been pleased to find out later on, of course, that Anne Archer, playing the spurned wife to Michael

 

Douglas’s lousy husband, pummelled Close’s character.

 

Dramas are considered more difficult to test, as are violent films, while comedies are relatively easy.

 

Comedies tend to be previewed more than other kinds of movies because you can look at the timing of how jokes are playing, says Madden.

 

Maybe you need a little bit more air between this joke and the next joke. Or, in order for a joke to get a laugh you may need to extend a piece. It’s very helpful because you’re getting audible responses.

 

To hear proponents of audience testing talk about it and even most people opposed to it concede there is some benefit to listening to audiences is to hear about a Hollywood practice that often means the difference between a well received movie and one that prompts movie studios to look for fresh talent.

What's amazing to me is how I now look at tracking, test results, focus groups, with feverish passion, says Marcus Nispel, director of the 2003 remake Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as told to Greg Solman of Adweek magazine.

 

Before, you question everything, you think it all doesn’t matter. Focus groups? What do people really know? Now that the movie is getting 95% approval ratings, it completely validates that focus groups are geniuses.

 

The beauty of audience testing is that it’s a security measure. Not uncommon on Broadway, where for decades its been standard practice for plays to work out the kinks in front of audiences far from New York City. It’s also not uncommon for musical acts to perform before a cosy group of beer-guzzlers well before risking a fortune on a tour.

 

Audience testing is not uncommon in Hollywood, either. Far from it. In fact, audience testing may sound like a recent reaction to Corporate Hollywood, where escalating movie budgets are matched only by escalating pressures to turn a profit. But it has been in full swing for more than two decades. There was even a bit of audience testing going on in the pioneering days of the 1930s and 1940s.

 

While test screenings can help a big studio avoid sinking itself with a big-budget fiasco, it can also help the little guy.

 

It is a very good tool for talking to distributors, says Bruno Pischiutta, President and CEO of Toronto Pictures and director of the independent release ? Maybe, which is debuting in Los Angeles this April.

 

If I say to a distributor that every girl between 15 and 17 will like my movie, it means nothing. But if I show a report that 85% say the movie is great, that is useful data.

 

The downside

Yet, while audience testing is great and wonderful, there is naturally a downside. Several, actually. Of course, there is the issue of imposing the public’s two cents on the creative process.

 

The battle for creative control has always had its place in Hollywood, as it should, and that will always be the case. A few of the newer problems with audience testing are more ominous.

 

One research executive says it’s not uncommon these days to have studio chiefs persuade research companies to get results from the test audience that they want. The idea is to release a version of the movie they want and not necessarily the one writers and directors have laboured on for years.

 

A far more pervasive problem is the issue of having unsavoury people infiltrate audience tests, only for the purpose of posting reviews of unreleased movies on websites like Aint-It-Cool-News.com.
More troublesome, is the fact that pirates are in their midst. Research company eMarketer estimates that the movie industry loses about US$3 billion in revenue from people copying and distributing movies online.

 

That’s chump change compared to what the music and software companies are losing. But movie piracy is a growing problem. More than one out of four college students admitted to downloading movies or swapping them on file-sharing programs, according to a 2003 survey.

 

That has put a bug in the ointment for the movie studios and audience testing companies. Almost all researchers have at least one story about a person in a test screening who filmed the movie as it was being shown.

 

The movie studios and research companies naturally do their best to weed out these characters. But most also admit there is little that can be done to stop it.

 

Sometimes you have them sign legal forms that say they legally agree that they will not do something like that, says MarketCast’s Hermelin.

 

If it’s really a concern, you make announcements; you do what you can.

 

That helps explain, in part, why audience testing today is unchanged from what it was 20 years ago. Groups of people are recruited, sit in a theatre, say their piece and a few spew out verbal gems in a focusgroup.

 

Rarely does any of this happen online. That’s too risky and it is too difficult to select a representative audience.

 

Another thing that makes change difficult is that you have 20 years of normative data, says James Medick, CEO and Founder of the MRCGroup Research Institute in Las Vegas.

 

They can even go back and compare the results to a movie from the 1940s. So if a comedy is expected to rate at a certain level, they know whether they have a breakthrough or a mediocre movie, based on the normative data.

 

One emerging change in audience testing is that it’s becoming commonplace around the world.

 

You can be part of the test if you live in Kansas, you can be part of the test if you live in Los Angeles and you can be part of the test if you live in London, says Hermelin. [International testing] is not as common as it is here. But, both for American product that’s being distributed abroad or local product, it’s happening more and more often.